Enclosures (fenced, grazing or clipping) within a certain period of years are the most common tools for restoration of degraded grasslands in temperate regions. Short-term enclosures can improve biodiversity and productivity by effectively relieving grazing pressure, while long-term enclosures can reduce species diversity. We therefore carried out a field experiment to investigate the specific ...

Design charts for seismic pressures against rigid walls subjected to horizontal earthquake shaking are presented for both uniform and nonuniform backfills. Solutions are based on a simplified model of soil response which gives results that agree almost exactly with rigorous solutions. Peak seismic thrusts are presented for three different soil profiles. For each profile, 250 combinations of gro...

This study conducted plant growth tests using a rhizobox system to quantitatively determine the distance of immobilization lead migrating from contaminated soil into uncontaminated rhizosphere soil, and to assess the lead phases accumulated in rhizosphere soil by sequential extraction. Without the hydroxyapatite, exchangeable lead fractions increased as the rhizosphere soil got closer to the co...

This paper studies the efficiency of subgrade stiffening next to the track as a mitigation measure for railway induced vibrations by means of a two-and-a-halfdimensional coupled finite element – boundary element methodology. The pyhsical mechanism is interpreted in the frequency–wavenumber domain, illustrating that the stiffened block of soil next to the track can act as a wave impeding barrier...